Proper Preparation for Time Travel

What will you need when you get there? Even if you have to travel light be sure to take some note paper, an extra large pair of glasses, and you’d better pack a lunch in case you’re gone for a while. It also helps to do your math homework and to have some friends that are experienced time travelers. They can help you with tricky questions about arriving back in the broccoli patch before you’ve even left. But the most important things to bring are things that you must find within yourself: courage and love. A Wrinkle in Time / Madeleine L'Engle

Meg Murry is anxious. She’s worried about school and she’s not happy about the way she looks, and wonders if she’s not smart. She's also worried about her five-year-old brother Charles Wallace. He says that he’s met a Mrs. Whatsit in the haunted house in the area, and no one in her family has heard from her father in years. Then who should come pounding on the kitchen door on a dark and stormy night and be let in by her mother? Mrs. Whatsit, bundled up in colored scarves, a man’s hat and a shocking-pink stole. As she is leaving she says a very strange thing to Meg’s mother, “there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

A tesseract, a mathematical term for a cube extended into four dimensions, is not a word that comes up often in casual conversation, but it was something that Meg’s mother was discussing with her husband before he disappeared. The next day Meg reluctantly accompanies her brother to Mrs. Whatsit’s house. There they encounter Calvin O’Keefe, a basketball player a couple of grades ahead of Meg in school, and then all three meet Mrs. Whatsit's friends: Mrs. Who and then Mrs. Which, and then they all “tesser” through time and space to rescue Meg’s father. It just a short (several days) but eventful trip to three planets and back before they land back in a patch broccoli in their own garden a few minutes before they left.

When You Reach Me / Rebecca Stead
Last year when she was eleven, Miranda got a copy of her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. She carries a copy around with her all the time. This year, 1978, her mother is practicing to be a contestant on "The $20,000 Pyramid." It's a TV game show where you have to guess groups of things. Soon Miranda starts to think in groups like, Thinks That Smell, Things That Sneak Up on You, Things You Push Away, and Things That Make No Sense. In this last group fit: her friend Sal, who lives in the same New York City apartment building with her, suddenly doesn’t want to walk to school with her or have anything to do with her, the crazy guy on the corner who suddenly jumps out on the street and starts kicking, “like he was trying to punt one of the cars speeding up Amsterdam Avenue,” and the strange notes. Why she is getting strange notes mysteriously tucked into her books and pockets that predict what will happen to her and her friends in the future? It really is a Thing That Makes No Sense when the predictions start coming true. Then the notes fit into the group of Things That Fall Apart before they go into the group of Difficult Things, and then finally into Things That Heal.

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